I've been covering the business of news, information and entertainment in one form or another for more than 10 years. In February 2014, I moved to San Francisco to cover the tech beat. My primary focus is social media and digital media, but I'm interested in other aspects, including but not limited to the sharing economy, lifehacking, fitness & sports tech and the evolving culture of the Bay Area. In past incarnations I've worked at AOL, Conde Nast Portfolio, Radar and WWD. Circle me on Google+, follow me on Twitter or send me tips or ideas at jbercovici@forbes.com.

A New Weapon In Upworthy's Unlikely War On Clickbait

Getting readers to click on headlines and share articles is what Upworthy does better than almost any other website in existence. That’s the talent that allowed it to become one of the fastest-growing media start-ups ever, with more than 10 million unique visitors in June, according to comScore.

But in a surprise twist worthy of, well, an Upworthy headline, the people behind the viral-with-a-purpose publisher are on a mission to cleanse the web of content that exists primarily to be clicked on or shared. Their latest source is a piece of open-source code they’re releasing Monday to encourage publishers and advertisers to distinguish between content that’s actually engaging and content designed just to produce page views, Facebook shares and other blunt-instrument metrics.

The code is a tool that lets publishers start measuring what Upworthy calls “attention minutes,” a new metric it’s attempting to promote as an industry standard. The web analytics firm Parse.ly is adding Upworthy’s code to its product, and Chartbeat has taken up the banner as well, adopting attention minutes as a standard metric.

Upworthy co-founder Eli Pariser. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Within Upworthy, the conversation about the need for a better way of measuring audience sparked up after one month in which Google Analytics reported the time spent by users on an average page as 20 minutes, an absurdly high figure that obviously didn’t correlate to reality. That led to a more general discussion about the ways that existing metrics create incentives for publishers to churn out sexed-up headlines, padded slideshows and other digital junk food that research shows people seldom truly engage with.

“It’s easy to game clicks. What we’ve seen are the really negative results of that,” says Daniel Mintz, Upworthy’s director of business intelligence. “People just assume the existing analytics solutions know what’s happening.”

Whereas page views only reflect whether a page has been opened — and shares signify arguably even less, given how often people Tweet links to stories without reading them — attention minutes set a high bar, says Mintz: If a user isn’t actively scrolling down a page, mousing around it or playing a video for more than a few seconds at a time, she’s no longer considered part of the audience. “This is a pretty conservative and unforgiving metric,” says Mintz. “It’s a pretty hard metric to game. The way you game it is by serving your users better.”

A world free of clickbait sounds pretty good, but a cynic might note that Upworthy mounted its campaign at precisely the moment when its performance as quantified by the old metrics started to sputter. After hitting a high of almost 18 million unique visitors in November 2013, its audience subsided to between 10 million and 12 million in the first half of 2014.

The timing isn’t a coincidence, but the causality runs the other way around, says Ed Urgola, the company’s head of marketing and communications. “This has sort of been an investment period for us,” with resources temporarily shifted to the rollout of attention minutes and other new initiatives. With a crop of new “curators” hired in June, Urgola says the traffic numbers for the month ought to be “up and to the right” again — even if those aren’t the numbers it wants the rest of the world to focus on.

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